Emmy Laybourne - Monument 14

Josie was a natural.

Where Astrid had that kick-ass camp counselor thing, Josie was a mom. A sixteen-year-old, middle-aged mom.

Her story just about put me to sleep, too.

Alex was snoring.

We had followed Josie’s example and gotten ourselves those self-inflating air mattresses.

The difference was mighty. Mighty comfortable. Settling onto it, I realized how sore and tired my bones felt. The adrenaline and the shock of, well, everything had had me flying high.

Now I was starting to feel my body again. And it was a wreck. Also I had a bitch of a headache from Brayden’s punch.

Josie came over and knelt down next to my bed.

“Can you write something to say tomorrow?” she asked me.

“At the ceremony?”

She nodded.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re a good writer.”

“How do you know?” I said.

She rolled her eyes.

“It’s just… I’m not a public writer. What I write is just a record. For me,” I told her.

Josie sighed. The endless patience and gentleness she had seemed to have with the kids was gone. She rubbed her eyes agitatedly.

“We need a ceremony, okay? They need it. And it needs to feel like it’s coming from everybody. Not just me. Do you see what I mean? It can’t just be some dumb thing that I’m making everybody do. If it’s going to work, to actually help us, it’s got to come from us all.”

“Okay, okay.” I gave in. “You’re right, Josie. I’ll write something. I’ll do it.”

I had some thoughts already, to tell the truth.

“And thanks for organizing it,” I said. “We do need to do something. For them.”

She got up and stepped away from me, then turned back.

“No,” she said. “It’s me who should say thanks. So… thanks.”

For the company, I guess.

“Hey, Dean, can I ask you something else?”

“Sure,” I answered.

Josie looked down, as if she were inspecting her slippers.

“What day is it?” She laughed self-consciously. “I mean… I lost some time there. Everything was sort of fuzzy. It feels like we’ve been here for a long time, but I don’t think so.”

“It’s Thursday.” I said. “And we got here on Tuesday.”

“Three days?” she said in shock. She started to laugh. “Three days?! That’s totally insane.”

“What’s insane?” Niko said, approaching us silently, as usual. His left eye was swollen shut and though he was tidy in general, I could see the faint outline of nose-blood crusted in his nostrils.

“Wow. You okay?” Josie asked him.

“I’m fine,” he said. The stoic Niko. Brave Hunter Man. “But thanks for asking.” Polite, too.

“Did you know it’s Thursday!” Josie said. “We’ve only been here for three days. Doesn’t it seem like a lifetime?”

“It really does,” Niko said.

I agreed. I thought of all that had happened—the bus crash, learning about the megatsunami, the earthquake, the compounds, me attacking Alex, the guy at the gate, Astrid attacking Batiste…

Three days.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better, Josie,” Niko said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. I rolled onto my back. I was sleepy and ready to go to sleep.

Niko stood watching Josie, who was lost in thought.

There was something going on with Niko that I’d never seen before. His usual detached, intelligent gaze was softened. He seemed more open.

Like he really was glad Josie was feeling better, not just because she was an asset to our group, but because he cared about her.

“Three days!” Josie said quietly, shaking her head.

One week before the ceremony, I’d say I would have been about as likely to read an original poem in front of my classmates as I would have been to stand under Astrid’s window and serenade her with a mariachi band.

But a week can change everything and now I was going to read a poem.

The poem had come to me in the middle of the night. I groped for my journal. I wrote furiously, trying to get the poem down on paper. My pen scratching on the paper was the only sound in the dark, quiet store besides the distant hum of the refrigerators.

I fell back asleep, convinced I had written the most beautiful poem in the world. In my sleepy state, I was sure it would heal the world—this poem of mine.

Then I woke up in the morning to hear Batiste repeating everything Chloe said.

When I opened my journal to bask in my brilliance, it was, of course, total scribble scrabble. I could only make out a couple words. The pen drifted all over the page and the funny thing is that I had underlined, very emphatically, in several places, but there were no words above the underlines. Just lines with exclamation points after them.

So I pretty much had to start from scratch.

Hey, guess who cooked breakfast? Me and Alex. You would think everyone would have been tired of my half burnt–half raw delicacies, but they ate my cold yet crispy frozen waffles and blackened hash browns right up. At breakfast Josie told us the ceremony would be in the Bed and Bath area in one hour. She asked us not to go near there so she could finish setting it up.

“Do we get to dress up?” Caroline asked.

Max groaned and rolled his eyes.

“What? It’s a ceremony, right? Like church?” she asked.

“That’s a good idea, Caroline. Everyone get dressed up,” Josie said.

“Can I just wear this?” Brayden asked. He had on jeans and a sweatshirt.

Josie looked pointedly to Jake. She waited.

Jake cleared his throat.

“I think we should all dress up,” Jake said to Brayden. “You know, show respect.”

I gave myself a good once-over with baby wipes and put on fresh clothes. I retrieved my journal from where I’d left it in my sleeping bag. I was looking over my poem, fretting about some word or comma or something, when I heard wind chimes.

“What’s that sound?” came little Henry’s voice.

He climbed out of the toy-box playhouse that he and his sister had made. Caroline came right behind him.

“Um, wind chimes,” I said. “I think Josie is making that sound to tell us it’s time to go to the ceremony.”

“Our mom loves those things,” Henry told me, taking my hand. “She has like five of them and they hang in the garden out back. They get all tangled up in the winter but she always goes and straightens them out. She just loves the sound of ’em.”

“I know,” I said. “We can hear them from our yard.”

My mom called their mom a hippie because of all her wind chimes, but I wasn’t about to say that.

“Our mommy says they sound like fairy music,” Caroline added.

“Hey!” Henry said. “Do you think we could get some for her? Take them with us when it’s time to go?”

“That’s a good present,” Caroline added, nodding.

“Sure,” I said. “You can take her two wind chimes, if you want. One from each of you.”

The twins grinned at each other.

They had chosen matching dress-up clothes for themselves. Henry in black pants, a plaid shirt, and a sweater vest. Caroline in a little plaid dress that matched Henry’s shirt and tights and shiny black shoes.

They had washed their freckled faces and combed their hair.

I thought, Who are these kids?

And what do they think is going on here?

He certainly didn’t ask to be picked up, but I hoisted up that little Henry anyway. He put his arms around my neck and it felt good. Caroline clung to my hand.

“I’m glad you’re here, Dean,” she said to me. “Because you’re our neighbor and we knew you from before.”